A US government agency will soon announce which of five remaining candidate algorithms will become SHA-3, the new hash function to replace SHA-1 and SHA-2. The latter is a key component in various security technologies, from SSL and SSH to PGP and IPsec, and must be used by law in certain US government applications.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology's decision to name the winning algorithm will mark the end of a six-year competition.

However one of the software authors still in the running, cryptography guru Bruce Schneier, hopes that all five functions - including his own - will be passed over. The "no award" decision Schneier wants would effectively leave the competition open until a compelling reason to make a change emerges.

__________________
You don't need to be a genius to debug a pf.conf firewall ruleset, you just need the guts to run tcpdump